


Taste of Home

by JazzRaft



Series: Dark at Night [39]
Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: M/M, Reunions, Survivor Guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-08
Updated: 2018-11-08
Packaged: 2019-08-20 12:29:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,430
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16555775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JazzRaft/pseuds/JazzRaft
Summary: After ten years left in the dark, Nyx finally has Noctis back. And all he has to welcome him home with is a crappy cup of coffee.





	Taste of Home

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Aithilin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aithilin/gifts).



> Originally posted on [tumblr](http://jazzraft.tumblr.com/post/179881240782/prompt-time-nyxnoct-small-sips-of-a-hot-drink) for [aithilin](http://aithilin.tumblr.com/).

“Is this awful? Or have I just forgotten how bad coffee tastes?”

“Oh, no, you’re right. It’s awful. I can try and find something else…”

“No! It’s fine… I kind of like it.”

To prove it, Noctis lifted the big, chipped cup to his lips, sipping the bitter drink as if he were savoring a fine, Accordon wine. Nyx smiled, a sensation just about as forgotten to him as Noct’s taste for coffee – awful or otherwise. The Prince… the _King_ now – though Nyx didn’t believe for a second that he’d ever remember to think of Noctis with such a lofty title – sunk beneath the tattered, yellow sheets. Moth-bitten and mottled with stains the color of scrubbed-out, old blood – come to think of it, it might have been just that – it wasn’t a bed fit for a king.

But then, neither was his kingdom fit for his return.

Nyx had wanted to fix it for him. For the past ten years, he thought that he could. Every daemon slain, every mission returned to Lestallum without a hunter’s life lost, every generator repaired to bring new light to Lucis; he thought he could give Noctis back the home he remembered. The world he’d so ardently, desperately loved.

But that wasn’t Nyx’s destiny. As the scars on his arm served to remind him. As the sole cup of awful, unsweetened coffee, come to a lukewarm boil over a gaslight grill he could never get hot enough, reminded him. His destiny was to wait in the darkness he’d denied the Lucii by surviving their judgment. His destiny was to suffer the torment of failing to save Noctis from his.

“Nyx? Are you ever coming back?”

He’d asked Noct’s shade, in the mire of his darker dreams, that very same question. As the long dark drew ever on, he’d begged, on his knees, hands cut open on shattered shards of the Crystal, for his phantom to come home. _Are you ever coming back? Am I going to die without ever seeing you again? Are you?_

Even in the afterglow of absolving all that time forced between them; even after the patient fierceness of their love-making, the ravening madness of coming together after so long untouched; even after pressing into the strangeness of new muscle and tasting the old, native skin that still warmed beneath his fingertips like a guttering lantern seeking sanctuary from a storm…

Nyx was so afraid that none of it was real; that the intensity of his anguish had prescribed him such an authentic hallucination for satiating his loneliness, he could lose his mind in this lie of his own making.

But there were all these little evidences to the vision in his bed which attested to Noct’s place in reality. All of the differences to his body which didn’t fit the frayed memory in Nyx’s mind, clutched so closely to his chest, held so tightly in his hands that his fingerprints crinkled the lines, the heat of his anxious heartbeat blurring the colors together whenever he thought of him.

He would only ever be able to see Noctis as he always had: younger than his age, anxiously fumbling on the razor’s edge between his childhood and his ascension; terrified of himself and desperate for the whole world, with all its promises of freedom and discovery and everything the Crown couldn’t offer him. He wouldn’t have been able to imagine Noctis like this: older than his own soul, resolute, steady as he stepped over that edge and kept striding forward; unafraid of a secret Nyx knew he was keeping – one he had the feeling _should_ be feared.

He was powerful and he was tired of it, long before he ever had to put that power to use. He was different. The stillness in his eyes was a stranger to Nyx. The things he didn’t say were, too. But in just as many ways, he was still the same man. Still tentative about his own allure, still eyeing Nyx from behind the veil of his hair as if he were unsure, afraid that he’d done something to repel Nyx from coming back to bed.

“You don’t have to drink it,” Nyx said, lightly, knowing he only kept the coffee as a shield for his immortal anxieties. And that was so very _Noctis._

“Might help get it down if you shared it with me.”

Noctis shyly extended the cup towards Nyx, beckoning him closer with his familiar caution, his need to know that he’d pleased him, that he was good enough for Nyx to want to stay.

The old bunk wheezed as Nyx sat back down, magnetized to Noctis’s side, just as enthralled and attached to him as the first day he knew he was in love with him. This nearness was just as terrifying as that distance; the strangeness of it, the newness of needing another person so urgently that the separateness was almost nauseating. He was afraid, and he was so very much in love with it, in love with Noctis. So in love that he’d happily choke down the awful coffee in his name.

“Wouldn’t want to chase you back to your crystal with my terrible coffee,” he teased, taking pity on him by taking the cup to his own lips. Yeah, it was still pretty bad.

Noctis smiled, slow and soft as a feather falling through a windless sky. Nyx ached for him as if he were a million miles and ten years too far away from him again. As if he were at the other end of that hall in the Citadel, when he could have been standing next to him instead. As if he were on the other side of the bridge, lost in the wild plains of Lucis, when Nyx should have been at his side.

They were barely inches apart now. And still, Nyx ached.

“I’m sorry that I couldn’t give you more.”

Guilt has been his favored companion through the darkness for a great deal of those ten years past. Guilt that he had never done enough – not for Galahd, not for Insomnia, not for all of Eos, in the end. Guilt that he kept going, kept living through so many failures, while others did not.

Maybe a better hero could have saved Noctis from the Crystal. Maybe a better hero could have kept his king from being cut down. Maybe a better hero could have protected his home when the monsters came roaring through the night.

But he wasn’t that hero. All he had to show for his service was a dingy, drafty caravan, creaking with the shifts of darkness and crawling with his nightmares. Stained sheets and warped counters and flat, stitched pillows; a water-logged roof and cigarette burns, proof of old habits falling off the wagon and losing a wheel so he couldn’t get back on; cold, canned beans and crap coffee.

He sipped it again, swallowing the bitter bile. Noctis took the cup from his hands when he was done, and sipped it too.

“This is all I wanted,” he said, voice weighted with sincerity.

“You always did have strange tastes,” Nyx laughed, hoarsely.

Noctis looked around the cramped caravan, sipping thoughtfully at his coffee. “I don’t mind it. It reminds me of your place… Home.”

His crappy little apartment, with his crappy taste in home décor – meaning nonexistent. His threadbare blankets and peeling walls and split-at-the-seams armchair. His microwave meals and dusty jars of homemade sauce he sometimes remembered to make for himself on Sundays. He had better coffee, though. At home. Home that had never felt like home until Noctis made it his.

Looking at him now, letting the edges of his narrow little world fade away, he could almost believe that they were back there. The ruined locks of Noct’s hair twisted in the ghosts of Nyx’s fists, the spectral pink blooms fading across his skin like lilies closing to nighttime, the sleepy tug of a smile on his lips, unguarded in the safety of Nyx’s bed, loud with rusted springs and papery sheets though it was. Coffee in his hands. Long, white fingers threaded like a warm scarf around the neck of the mug, looped through the handle, pressed to the ceramic in search of heat when the flavor didn’t otherwise satisfy him.

Noctis kept drinking the coffee, and Nyx bent down to kiss him as he was coming up from another pungent taste. It was different when it was on Noct’s tongue. Different, and wholly the same as Nyx remembered.

Like a little taste of home.

**Author's Note:**

> Airing out my scattered noggin' with some good, old-fashioned, feelsy fluff prompt fills is gonna get me back on the WIP track, I can feel it! This is my Rocky Balboa training montage! Enjoy!


End file.
